UKH

Is it time to persuade manufacturers to bring their jobs back from China?

Should we think about boycotting buying items made in China? That would be very difficult, I know but.....

Yes, I know that other Asian countries make our goods as well, but the present situation must act as a wake up call. Create jobs here in the UK, and other European countries, give disaffected young people some hope of future employment, and maybe, maybe, help to reduce the knife and drug crime rate. Yes, prices to us would go up, but we could stand it in the whole scheme of things.

Why? To “punish China” or something?

It's not time to make major political decisions really.

Making more "at home" would probably make a lot of sense, but why would this time, in particular, be the time for that?

And actually boycotting China would be self-defeating, racist, idiocy.

No.

How much more would you be prepared to pay?

How would you do it?

No, not to punish China. This situation makes us realise how reliant, and therefore vulnerable, we are for items from abroad, from outdoor gear to PPE for the NHS. We import 80% of our foodstuffs. If the next global breakdown of trade/supply was due to Katla erupting (which is overdue) we might be able to weather the situation more effectively, and with less impact on our economy.

I wonder if one of the top outdoor manufactureres could give us a figure for the % price difference for a waterproof made entirely in the UK and one made in China, or Vietnam, or Indonesia. I'll bet it's not as much as you might think. PHD's prices aren't way off the mark of a top end goretex from Patagucci. It always seems daft to me that Rab send their fabric for sleeping bags to China to be made up into the shell but then ship them back to the UK to fill them. I wonder how much they save in costs/profit more, by doing that?

Have you been talking to a Mr Trump?

It sounds a bit like his America first policy. America has the resources to do that, but not the will. If an item costs £1 and a very similar one £5, which one will be more popular with the consumer?

It's not just China you need to watch. If/ when you next go to a supermarket, have a look at where the fresh herbs and fruit come from. It can't be that countries in Africa are the only places able to grow coriander or chives. If you can crack the global trade conundrum, you'll be some way to reducing global warming as well.

If you wish to boycott China, that's great. But you may have a hard time working out if your shirt, that was stitched in Thailand, using cotton from India, uses buttons from China, for example.

Does that include producing the synthetics they are all made of ?

You aren't getting my point. It's not about punishing anyone, it's about creating jobs that the UK needs, for now and the future, (sustainability), it's about a degree of self-sufficiency if we get an event like this again, and it's about paying a fair price for goods. I can go to the local farm shop and source locally grown produce, I try to buy food items with as low a 'supply miles' as possible, and I'm just wondering, regardless of where the fabric comes from, what would be the price difference if Rab, for example, made it's sleeping bags entirely in the UK.

Manufacturing in the Far East makes sense if a significant proportion of the manufacturing cost is labour cost and shipping cost per item isn't high. I don't know what the average cost of Labour is in China now but it used to maybe 10% of the UK cost, which wasn't much different from the US cost either.

20 years ago my company was making webcams and used a UK manufacturer to do so but when orders started to rise but pressure mounted on costs we were forced to move production to China. If we hadn't we wouldn't have been able to sell our product.

Same would go for anything else, if you started making stuff here it would cost more and either you wouldn't be able to sell it or you'd make less profit than your competitors and thus have less money to grow your business with. If the government forbid manufacture in the Far East they'd have to do it by imposing import duty I think in which case we'd be likely to have the Chinese return the compliment and start a trade war.

The growth of the global economy which has made the world a richer place is based on having as few barriers to trade as possible and different countries concentrating on making and selling what they're good at, comparative advantage. While I have some reservations about it, overall it seems to have worked well.

We no longer have the industrial base to compete with China and the bosses of industry would rather pay slave wages in some other country than pay a decent wage here and the people here would rather pay a few quid less for things made by near slave labour than pay more something to ensure someone can actually live off their wages

I read somewhere recently that's it cheaper to ship things around the world than it is to post a letter.

Volume is what matters here, take a look at any container port.

The real democracy that decides where things are made is the billions of individual purchasing decisions that people make.  On balance, humans go for the cheaper option and manufacturers have simply found ways, in a competitive market, to satisfy that.

The location of manufacturing isn't driven by politics, no matter how much populist politicians tell us that they are.  American jobs didn't go to China because of some left-wing plot but because millions of buyers from Walmart or Ford bought the cheaper goods on offer.

If we want to "persuade" manufacturers to produce goods in their country of consumption then we - individually - have to, on balance, buy the more expensive, locally made goods.

You’d simply create a new China in another country 

I watched an interesting programme by I don't know who Andrew Marr or someone about how technology spread across the globe and how we've lost all our manufacturing.
We started it back in the 18thC, and we had dirt cheap labour, 6 year olds working in mills etc. and we all start getting richer.
But as knowledge and technology spread, other poorer countries start the same manufacturing with their own dirt cheap labour, under cutting us, and on and on.  You get the idea.

Maybe, one day, maybe, in some bright fantastical future, everyone will be payed the same and there will no more need for shipping shite from the other side of the planet?

I've got to lay off the booze.

"I don't even know what that means."
"No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. 

It gets the people going!"

Because most people are selfish and short sighted. They want to have their cake and eat it. They buy foreign cars, foreign electronics, eat imported food, then blame the government for not supporting UK industry. 

Why? Who would look at those jobs and think: "this is exactly what the British worker needs for life." Outsourcing those jobs to China, etc, gave most people in Europe a better life. We should strive towards making jobs even better than they are now.

That day is when wages have evened out across the globe.  It's not as far off as most people think.